FEATURE:
To Have Been There on the Night…
Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn Live Album at Six
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A couple of Kate Bush albums…
PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
celebrate anniversaries in November. In fact, that is not true. What I mean is a couple of non-studio albums celebrate anniversaries. I wanted to include and highlight them, as they are important. One is her greatest hits album, The Whole Story. I wanted to spend some time today looking at the live album of her 2014 residency, Before the Dawn. I have talked about that twenty-two-date series of shows many times though the years. The live album is incredible to listen to. Before the Dawn is an amazing album that Bush spend a long time helping to mix and get right. I do love when artists get involved with the final sound of a live album. There has been no DVD of the show, so the live album is the only documentation those who did not go have. I did not get a ticket, so I can only imagine what it would have been like in Hammersmith at the Eventim Apollo watching in 2014. The live album was released on 25th November. I am going to publish another feature about the live album nearer to the anniversary. There was a series of unofficial releases called Before the Dawn from Apollo. In fact, a few bootleg and unofficial releases are there that were recorded during the first few nights of the residency. It is a shame that these are available, because the official album is one that fans need to buy and treasure – though I can appreciate these unofficial releases are cheaper.
Before the Dawn was released on a four-L.P. set, a double-C.D., and a digital download. Reaching number four in the U.K., this album is very important. Not only is it another that has reached the top ten – all of her studio albums have reached the top ten, as did The Whole Story -, but it is technically the latest album from her. 2011’s 50 Words for Snow is the latest studio album – and Bush remastered her albums in 2018 -, but this is the latest album with original vocals and performances. Because Before the Dawn is six on 25th November, I wanted to approach it from different angles. Released on Kate Bush’s Fish People album, it is a phenomenal recording from The KT Fellowship (the name she gave to her band). Go and get the album on vinyl if you can afford it, as it is such an immersive and jaw-dropping experience! Sourced from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia, here are the linear notes from the extraordinary album:
“It was an extraordinary experience putting the show together. It was a huge amount of work, a lot of fun and an enormous privilege to work with such an incredibly talented team. This is the audio document. I hope that this can stand alone as a piece of music in its own right and that it can be enjoyed by people who knew nothing about the shows as well as those who were there.
I never expected the overwhelming response of the audiences, every night filling the show with life and excitement. They are there in every beat of the recorded music. Even when you can’t hear them, you can feel them. Nothing at all has been re-recorded or overdubbed on this live album, just two or three sound FX added to help with the atmosphere.
On the first disc the track, Never Be Mine, is the only take that exists, and was recorded when the show was being filmed without an audience. It was cut because the show was too long but is now back in its original position. Everything else runs as was, with only a few edits to help the flow of the music.
On stage, the main feature of The Ninth Wave was a woman lost at sea, floating in the water, projected onto a large oval screen - the idea being that this pre-recorded film was reality. The lead vocals for these sequences were sung live at the time of filming in a deep water tank at Pinewood. A lot of research went into how to mic this vocal. As far as we know it had never been done before. I hoped that the vocals would sound more realistic and emotive by being sung in this difficult environment. (You can see the boom mic in the photo on the back of the booklet. This had to be painted out of every shot in post-production although very little of the boom mic recording was used. The main mic was on the life jacket disguised as an inflator tube!) The rest of the lead vocals on this disc were sung live on stage as part of the dream sequences. The only way to make this story work as an audio piece was to present it more like a radio play and subdue the applause until the last track when the story is over and we are all back in the theatre again with the audience response.
Unlike The Ninth Wave which was about the struggle to stay alive in a dark, terrifying ocean, A Sky Of Honey is about the passing of a summer’s day. The original idea behind this piece was to explore the connection between birdsong and light, and why the light triggers the birds to sing. It begins with a lovely afternoon in golden sunlight, surrounded by birdsong. As night falls, the music slowly builds until the break of dawn.
This show was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever been involved in. Thank you to everyone who made it happen and who embraced the process of allowing it to continually evolve. (Album liner notes)”.
You can pick up memorabilia of Before the Dawn if you were not lucky enough to be there. I think that the album is one that every Kate Bush fan should have in their collections. I want to get to a couple of reviews for the 2016 live album. Before that, FADER were one of the lucky few who interviewed Kate Bush to promote it. It is interesting hearing what she said about the shows – and the fact she ranks Before the Dawn as one of her greatest achievements:
“You really dug into the archives for your 2014 live shows. How has your relationship with your older material evolved?
Well, part of the decision to do the live shows was because it was such an interesting challenge to work with the two narrative pieces [“The Ninth Wave” and “A Sky of Honey”], rather than just doing a bunch of single tracks.
It was within such a specific context, because [the setlist] was very much put together for a live event. Through that process, the songs naturally evolved because I was working with a band, a lot of whom I never worked with before. I just chose tracks that I wanted to do, that really worked with the band, and to keep it really focused in a rhythmic way.
Although the music was always kept as the lead, I didn't want the visuals to feel separate. What I had hoped was that what had been created was an integrated piece of theater that worked with the music — that it wasn't just music that had theatrics added to it — that there was a real sense of it being something that worked as a whole.
As a performer, do you get lost in the moment or do you focus on the technical intricacies?
I had to stay really focused as a performer because I'm quite nervous, and I wanted to make sure I was really present when I was performing so that I could try and deliver the character of the song. And actually, the first set was the most difficult part to perform for me, because almost each song is from a completely different place.
Before the 2014 shows you hadn’t toured since 1979. When your return to the stage was so well-received, did you wish you’d done it sooner?
I don't know really. The original show was of the first two albums that I’d made, and I had hoped that to do another show after I had another of two albums’ worth of material. And as I started getting much more involved in the recording process, it took me off into a different path where it was all about trying to make a good album. It became very time-consuming, so I moved into being more of a recording artist. And every time you finish an album, there's the opportunity to make visuals to go with some of the tracks. So I became very involved in that, as well.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during her Before the Dawn residency in 2014/PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay
Are you currently working on new music?
No, I'm not. I've been tied up with this project for a really long time. And right now I'm tied up with the promotion and other elements that go with getting ready to release the album. I'm looking forward to being in the space where I can think about what's next.
Do you have a technical achievement that you're most proud of in your career?
I'm really proud of what we did with those live shows, because it was very ambitious and I didn't know if it would work. It was a very complex technical show that involved the most incredible team of people. The most intelligent, sensitive people. Fantastic band, actors, everybody there had something so special to bring to that show, and I think the response that we got was more than you could ever wish for. I'm so pleased that we did it.
It was a very humbling experience, really. Every night you had a completely different audience, and every night they were so warm. It really meant so much that they liked it. It was very moving, because it felt like the audience came on that journey with us, and, each night, it was a slightly different journey”.
I want to round off with a couple of reviews for Before the Dawn. The reviews were largely positive for this live extravaganza. You can tell that Bush and the entire crew and team put their all into every show! The live album is an amazing documentation of something we will never see again. You can hear Bush’s happiness radiating throughout. Although nervous, there is no doubt she was feeling the love from the crowd each night! The Guardian said this in their 2016 review of the Before the Dawn album:
“A pressing question looms over Kate Bush’s new live release, her first since Live at Hammersmith Odeon in 1994, an album drawn from her then most recent live shows, some 15 years before. That question being: what’s the point? Live albums can only ever hope to give the faintest flavour of the multi-sensory experience of attending a gig, and Bush’s 2014 shows at the Hammersmith Odeon were about as multi-sensory an experience as gigs get. The subsequent album isn’t credited to Bush but the K Fellowship, presumably in recognition of the vast ancillary cast of musicians, technicians and actors required to bring Before the Dawn to fruition – but it obviously doesn’t capture most of the results of their work. You get a vague sense of the crackling excitement in the audience, but despite the plentiful photos in the CD booklet (“Note the parked helicopter at the top,” reads one caption) it can’t give you any real sense of the overwhelming visual spectacle of the shows, which the DVD that was mooted to appear last year, but never did, might have done. There are moments on the album when the audience break into spontaneous applause during a song. If you were there, you find yourself scrolling through your memory to work out what provoked it – not an easy task, given that audiences frequently seemed to be so overwhelmed to be in Bush’s presence that they applauded pretty much everything she did. If you weren’t, it’s doubtless even more frustrating.
Meanwhile, it’s hard to work out whether the original show’s solitary misstep – the clunky, ostensibly comedic playlet by novelist David Mitchell inserted in the middle of The Ninth Wave – is amplified or minimised by appearing on an album. Divested of the accompanying action, its dialogue sounds even more laboured, even more like a particularly spirit-sapping scene from perennially unfunny BBC1 sitcom My Family. On the other, well, there’s always the fast-forward button, although long-term fans might suggest that it wouldn’t really be a Kate Bush project unless an array of dazzling brilliance and original thinking was offset by at least one moment where she felt impelled to follow her muse somewhere you rather wish she hadn’t. You can file the playlet alongside The Dreaming’s Australian accent, dressing up as a bat on the back cover of Never for Ever, and The Line, The Cross and the Curve, the short film that accompanied The Red Shoes, later appraised by its author as “a load of bollocks”.
Clearly a degree of tinkering has gone on with the music. A beautiful take on Never Be Mine, from 1989’s The Sensual World, seems to have mysteriously appeared in the middle of the initial act, which never happened during the actual concerts, raising the tantalising prospect that far more material was prepared than made it to the final show. Perhaps they were off in a rehearsal studio somewhere, trying out versions of Suspended in Gaffa and Them Heavy People after all. But the really arresting thing about Before the Dawn – given that Bush is an artist whose perfectionism has led her to make a grand total of three albums in the last 22 years, one of them consisting of pernickety rerecordings of old songs – is how raw it sounds.
Of course, raw is an adjective one uses relatively, when considering an album that features a band of blue-chip sessioneers, celebrated jazz-fusion musicians and former Miles Davis sidemen: you’re not going to mistake the contents of Before the Dawn for those of, say, Conflict’s Live Woolwich Poly ’86. But, unlike most latterday live albums, it actually sounds like a band playing live. There’s a sibilance about the vocals, a sort of echoey, booming quality to the sound, the occasional hint of unevenness: it doesn’t feel like a recording that’s been overdubbed and Auto-Tuned into sterility. Given their pedigree, you’d expect the musicians involved to be incredibly nimble and adept, but more startling is how propulsive and exciting they sound, even when dealing with Bush’s more hazy and dreamlike material. It’s a state of affairs amplified by Bush’s voice, which is in fantastic shape. On King of the Mountain or Hounds of Love, she has a way of suddenly shifting into a primal, throaty roar – not the vocal style you’d most closely associate with Kate Bush – that sounds all the more effective for clearly being recorded live. Furthermore, there’s a vividness about the emotional twists and turns of A Sea of Honey, A Sky of Honey – from the beatific, sun-dappled contentment associated with Balearic music to brooding sadness and back again – that just isn’t there on the studio version, great though that is.
That answers the question about what the point of Before the Dawn is: like 2011’s Director’s Cut, it’s an album that shows Bush’s back catalogue off in a different light. And perhaps it’s better, or at least more fitting, that her 2014 shows are commemorated with an album rather than a film or a Blu-ray or whatever it is that you play inside those virtual reality headsets people are getting so excited about. They were a huge pop cultural event, as the first gigs in four decades by one of rock’s tiny handful of real elusive geniuses were always bound to be, but they were shrouded in a sense of enigma: almost uniquely, hardly anyone who attended the first night had any real idea what was going to happen. Even more unusually, that air of mystery clung to the shows after the 22-date run ended: virtually everyone present complied with Bush’s request not to film anything on their phones, and the handful that didn’t saw their footage quickly removed from YouTube. Before the Dawn provides a memento for those who were there and a vague indication of what went on for those who weren’t, without compromising the shows’ appealingly mysterious air: a quality you suspect the woman behind it realises is in very short supply in rock music these days”.
I am going to end with Pitchfork’s take on Before the Dawn. Perhaps it is not a shock to see positive reviews for the album as the live show itself was lauded so highly! Not available on streaming services (just Apple Music), I hope that it does come there one day – as it would provide greater accessibility to new fans. The vinyl and C.D. versions are well worth the cost:
“Live albums are meant to capture performers at their rawest and least inhibited, which doesn’t really apply to Before the Dawn. Bush is a noted perfectionist best known for her synthesizer experiments and love of obscure Bulgarian choirs, but her recent work has skewed towards traditional setups that reunite her with the prog community that fostered her early career. With marks to hit and tableaux to paint, the 2014 shows were more War of the Worlds (or an extension of 2011’s Director’s Cut) than Live at Leeds. But never mind balls-out revamps of Bush’s best known songs; with the exception of tracks from Hounds of Love, none of the rest of the setlist had ever been done live—not even on TV, which became Bush’s primary stage after she initially retired from touring. These songs weren’t written to be performed, but internalized. Occupying Bush’s imagination for an hour, and letting it fuse with your own, formed the entirety of the experience. Hearing this aspic-preserved material come to life feels like going to sleep and waking up decades later to see how the world has changed.
PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay
“Jig of Life” is the midpoint of Before the Dawn, and its crux. It forms the part in “The Ninth Wave” where Bush’s character is exhausted of fighting against drowning, and decides to succumb to death. A vision of her future self appears, and convinces her to stay alive. “Now is the place where the crossroads meet,” she chants, just as her (then) 56-year-old voice channels her 27-year-old one. Despite her alleged taste for burning one, Bush’s voice has gained in power rather than faded with age. It’s deeper now, and some of the songs’ keys shift to match, but it’s alive and incalculably moving, still capable of agile whoops and tender eroticism, and possesses a newfound authority. When she roars lustily through opener “Lily” and its declaration that “life has blown a great big hole through me,” she sets up the stakes of Before the Dawn’s quest for peace. In Act One, she’s running from the prospect of love on “Hounds of Love” and “Never Be Mine,” and from fame on “King of the Mountain,” where she searches for Elvis with sensual anticipation. She asks for Joan of Arc’s protection on “Joanni,” matching the French visionary’s fearlessness with her own funky diva roar, and sounds as if she could raze the world as she looks down from “Top of the City.”
Rather than deliver a copper-bottomed greatest hits set, Bush reckons with her legacy through what might initially seem like an obscure choice of material. Both Acts Two and Three take place in transcendent thresholds: “The Ninth Wave”’s drowning woman is beset by anxiety and untold pressures, with no idea of where to turn, mirroring the limbo that Bush experienced after 1982’s The Dreaming. That suite’s last song, the cheery “The Morning Fog,” transitions into Aerial’s “Prelude,” all beatific bird call and dawn-light piano. The euphoric, tender “A Sky of Honey” is meant to represent a perfect day from start to finish, filled with family and beautiful imperfections. “Somewhere in Between” finds them atop “the highest hill,” looking out onto a stilling view, and Bush’s eerie jazz ensemble anticipates the liminal peace of Bowie’s Blackstar. “Not one of us would dare to break the silence,” she sings. “Oh how we have longed for something that would make us feel so… somewhere in between.”
Purgatory has become heaven, and in the narrative Bush constructs through her setlist, “A Sky of Honey” represents the grown-up, domestic happiness that staves off the youthful fears explored on Hounds of Love. For her final song, she closes with a rendition of “Cloudbusting,” a song about living with the memory of a forbidden love, which is even more glorious for all the hope that it’s accumulated in the past 30-odd years. Bush’s recent life as a “reclusive” mother is often used to undermine her, to “prove” she was the kook that sexist critics had pegged her as all along. These performances and this record are a generous reveal of why she’s chosen to retreat, where Bush shows she won’t disturb her hard-won peace to sustain the myth of the troubled artistic genius. Between the dangerous waters of “The Ninth Wave” and the celestial heavens of “A Sky of Honey,” Before the Dawn demystifies what we’ve fetishized in her absence. Without draining her magic, it lets Bush exist back down on Earth”.
Such an amazing album, Before the Dawn is six on 25th November. With Bush fully involved in the mix and sound for the album, it does make me sad that this might be the last live recording we hear from her. Those who attended one of the twenty-two nights in Hammersmith back in 2014 were treated to a remarkable and rare spectacle! In part persuaded to return to the stage by her on Bertie, the public definitely missed her! Listening to Before the Dawn transports you to that space. The songs come alive and, although we cannot see what the audience saw, you can imagine what is happening. It is a powerful and memorable live album from…
THE sensational Kate Bush.